The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor
by Thorstein Veblen
American Journal of Sociology
volume 4 (1898-99)
It is one of the commonplaces of the received economic theory
that work is irksome. Many a discussion proceeds on this axiom
that, so far as regards economic matters, men desire above all
things to get the goods produced by labor and to avoid the labor
by which the goods are produced. In a general way the
common-sense opinion is well in accord with current theory on
this head. According to the common-sense-ideal, the economic
beatitude lies in an unrestrained consumption of goods, without
work; whereas the perfect economic affliction is unremunerated
labor. Man instinctively revolts at effort that goes to supply
the means of life.
No one will accept the proposition when stated in this bald
fashion, but even as it stands it is scarcely an overstatement of
what is implied in the writings of eminent economists. If such an
aversion to useful effort is an integral part of human nature,
then the trail of the Edenic serpent should be plain to all men,
for this is a unique distinction of the human species. A
consistent aversion to whatever activity goes to maintain the
life of the species is assuredly found in no other species of
animal. Under the selective process through which species are
held to have emerged and gained their stability there is no
chance for the survival of a species gifted with such an aversion
to the furtherance of its own life process. If man alone is an
exception from the selective norm, then the alien propensity in
question must have been intruded into his make-up by some
malevolent deus ex machina.
Yet, for all the apparent absurdity of the thing, there is
the fact. With more or less sincerity, people currently avow an
aversion to useful effort. The avowal does not cover all effort,
but only such as is of some use; it is, more particularly, such
effort as is vulgarly recognized to be useful labor. Less
repugnance is expressed as regards effort which brings gain
without giving a product that is of human use, as, for example,
the effort that goes into war, politics, or other employments of
a similar nature. And there is commonly no avowed aversion to
sports or other similar employments that yield neither a
pecuniary gain nor a useful product. Still, the fact that a given
line of effort is useless does not of itself save it from being
odious, as is shown by the case of menial service; much of this
work serves no useful end, but it is none the less repugnant to
all people of sensibility.
"The economic man," whose lineaments were traced in outline
by the classical economists and filled in by their caricaturists,
is an anomaly in the animal word; and yet, to judge by everyday
popular expressions of inclination, the portrait is not seriously
overdrawn. But if this economic man is to serve as a lay figure
upon which to fit the garment of economic doctrines, it is
incumbent upon the science to explain what are his limitations
and how he has achieved his emancipation from the law of natural
selection. His emancipation from the law is, indeed, more
apparent than substantial. The difference in this respect between
man and his sometime competitors in the struggle for survival
lies not in a slighter but in a fuller adjustment of his
propensities to the purposes of the life of the species. He
distanced them all in this respect long ago, and by so wide an
interval that he is now able, without jeopardy to the life of the
species, to play fast and loose with the spiritual basis of its
survival.
Like other animals, man is an agent that acts in response to
stimuli afforded by the environment in which he lives. Like other
species, he is a creature of habit and propensity. But in a
higher degree than other species, man mentally digests the
content of the habits under whose guidance he acts, and
appreciates the trend of these habits and propensities. He is in
an eminent sense an intelligent agent. By selective necessity he
is endowed with a proclivity for purposeful action. He is
possessed of a discriminating sense of purpose, by force of which
all futility of life or of action is distasteful to him. There
may be a wide divergence between individuals as regards the form
and the direction in which this impulse expresses itself, but the
impulse itself is not a matter of idiosyncrasy, it is a generic
feature of human nature. It is not a trait that occurs
sporadically in a few individuals. Cases occur in which this
proclivity for purposeful action is wanting or is present in
obviously scant measure, but persons endowed in this stepmotherly
fashion are classed as "defective subjects." Lines of descent
which carry this defective human nature dwindle and decay even
under the propitious circumstances of modern life. The history of
hereditarily dependent or defective families is evidence to this
effect.
Man's great advantage over other species in the struggle for
survival has been his superior facility in turning the forces of
the environment to account. It is to his proclivity for turning
the material means of life to account that he owes his position
as lord of creation. It is not a proclivity to effort, but to
achievement- to the compassing of an end. His primacy is in the
last resort an industrial or economic primacy. In his economic
life man is an agent, not an absorbent; he is an agent seeking in
every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective,
impersonal end. As this pervading norm of action guides the life
of men in all the use they make of material things, so it must
also serve as the point of departure and afford the guiding
principle for any science that aims to be a theory of the
economic life process. Within the purview of economic theory, the
last analysis of any given phenomenon must run back to this
ubiquitous human impulse to do the next thing.
All this seems to contradict what has just been said of the
conventional aversion to labor. But the contradiction is not so
sheer in fact as it appears to be at first sight. Its solution
lies in the fact that the aversion to labor is in great part a
conventional aversion only. In the intervals of sober reflection,
when not harassed with the strain of overwork, men's common sense
speaks unequivocally under the guidance of the instinct of
workmanship. They like to see others spend their life to some
purpose, and they like to reflect that their own life is of some
use. All men have this quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or
industrial merit, and to this sense of economic merit futility
and inefficiency are distasteful. In its positive expression it
is an impulse or instinct of workmanship; negatively it expresses
itself in a deprecation of waste. This sense of merit and demerit
with respect to the material furtherance or hindrance of life
approves, the economically effective act and deprecates economic
futility. It is needless to point out in detail the close
relation between this norm of economic merit and the ethical norm
of conduct, on the one hand, and the aesthetic norm of taste, on
the other. It is very closely related to both of these, both as
regards its biological ground and as regards the scope and method
of its award.
This instinct of workmanship apparently stands in sheer
conflict with the conventional antipathy to useful effort. The
two are found together in full discord in the common run of men;
but whenever a deliberate judgment is passed on conduct or on
events, the former asserts its primacy in a pervasive way which
suggests that it is altogether the more generic, more abiding
trait of human nature. There can scarcely be a serious question
of precedence between the two. The former is a human trait
necessary to the survival of the species; the latter is a habit
of thought possible only in a species which has distanced all
competitors, and then it prevails only by sufferance and within
limits set by the former. The question between them is, Is the
aversion to labor a derivative of the instinct of workmanship?
and, How has it arisen and gained consistency in spite of its
being at variance with that instinct?
Until recently there has been something of a consensus among
those who have written on early culture, to the effect that man,
as he first emerged upon the properly human plane, was of a
contentious disposition, inclined to isolate his own interest and
purposes from those of his fellows, and with a penchant for feuds
and brawls. Accordingly, even where the view is met with that men
are by native proclivity inclined to action, there is still
evident a presumption that this native proclivity to action is a
proclivity to action of a destructive kind. It is held that men
are inclined to fight, not to work - that the end of action in
the normal case is damage rather than repair. This view would
make the proclivity to purposeful action an impulse to
sportsmanship rather than to workmanship. In any attempt to fit
this view into an evolutionary scheme of culture it would carry
the implication that in the prehuman or proto-anthropoid phase of
its life the race was a predaceous species, and that the initial
phase of human culture, as well as the later cultural
development, has been substantially of a predatory kind.
There is much to be said for this view. If mankind is by
derivation a race not of workmen but of sportsmen, then there is
no need of explaining the conventional aversion to work. Work is
unsportsmanlike and therefore distasteful, and perplexity then
arises in explaining how men have in any degree become reconciled
to any but a predaceous life. Apart from the immediate
convenience of this view, it is also enforced by much evidence.
Most peoples at a lower stage of culture than our own are of a
more predatory habit than our people. The history of mankind, as
conventionally written, has been a narrative of predatory
exploits, and this history is not commonly felt to be one-sided
or misinformed. And a sportsmanlike inclination to warfare is
also to be found in nearly all modern communities. Similarly, the
sense of honor, so-called, whether it is individual or national
honor, is also an expression of sportsmanship. The prevalence of
notions of honor may, therefore, be taken as evidence going in
the same direction. And as if to further fortify the claim of
sportsmanship to antiquity and prescriptive standing, the sense
of honor is also noticeably more vivid in communities of a
somewhat more archaic culture than our own.
Yet there is a considerable body of evidence, both from
cultural history and from the present-day phenomena of human
life, which traverses this conventionally accepted view that
makes man generically a sportsman. Obscurely but persistently,
throughout the history of human culture, the great body of the
people have almost everywhere, in their everyday life, been at
work to turn things to human use. The proximate aim of all
industrial improvement has been the better performance of some
workmanlike task. Necessarily this work has, on the one hand,
proceeded on the basis of an appreciative interest in the work to
be done; for there is no other ground on which to obtain anything
better than the aimless performance of a task. And necessarily
also, on the other hand, the discipline of work has acted to
develop a workmanlike attitude. It will not do to say that the
work accomplished is entirely due to compulsion under a predatory
regime, for the most striking advances in this respect have been
wrought where the coercive force of a sportsmanlike exploitation
has been least.
The same view is borne out by the expressions of common
sense. As has already been remarked, whenever they
dispassionately take thought and pass a judgment on the value of
human conduct, the common run of mature men approve workmanship
rather than sportsmanship. At the best, they take an apologetic
attitude toward the latter. This is well seen in the present (
May, 1 898) disturbance of the popular temper. While it may well
be granted that the warlike raid upon which this community is
entering is substantially an access of sportsmanlike exaltation,
it is to be noticed that nearly all those who speak for war are
at pains to find some colorable motive of another kind. Predatory
exploit, simply as such, is not felt to carry its own
legitimation, as it should in the apprehension of any species
that is primarily of a predaceous character. What meets
unreserved approval is such conduct as furthers human life on the
whole, rather than such as furthers the invidious or predatory
interest of one as against another.
The most ancient and most consistent habits of the race will
best assert themselves when men are not speaking under the stress
of instant irritation. Under such circumstances the ancient bent
may even bear down the immediate conventional canons of conduct.
The archaic turn of mind that inclines men to commend workmanlike
serviceability is the outcome of long and consistent habituation
to a course of life of such a character as is reflected by this
inclination.
Man's life is activity; and as he acts, so he thinks and
feels. This is necessarily so, since it is the agent man that
does the thinking and feeling. Like other species, man is a
creature of habits and propensities. He acts under the guidance
of propensities which have been imposed upon him by the process
of selection to which he owes his differentiation from other
species. He is a social animal; and the selective process whereby
he has acquired the spiritual make-up of a social animal has at
the same time made him substantially a peaceful animal. The race
may have wandered far from the ancient position of peacefulness,
but even now the traces of a peaceful trend in men's everyday
habits of thought and feeling are plain enough. The sight of
blood and the presence of death, even of the blood or death of
the lower animals, commonly strike inexperienced persons with a
sickening revulsion. In the common run of cases, the habit of
complacency with slaughter comes only as the result of
discipline. In this respect man differs from the beasts of prey.
He differs, of course, most widely in this respect from the
solitary beasts, but even among the gregarious animals his
nearest spiritual relatives are not found among the carnivora. In
his unarmed frame and in the slight degree to which his muscular
force is specialized for fighting, as well as in his instinctive
aversion to hostile contact with the ferocious beasts, man is to
be classed with those animals that owe their survival to an
aptitude, for avoiding direct conflict with their competitors,
rather than with those which survive by virtue of overcoming and
eating their rivals.
"Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living
things," and, according to the Law of the Jungle, it is his part
to take advice and contrive and turn divers things to account in
ways that are incomprehensible to the rest. Without tools he is
not a dangerous animal, as animals go. And he did not become a
formidable animal until he had made some considerable advance in
the contrivance of implements for combat. In the days before
tools had been brought into effective use - that is to say,
during by far the greater part of the period of human evolution -
man could not be primarily an agent of destruction or a disturber
of the peace. He was of a peaceable and retiring disposition by
force of circumstances. With the use of tools the possibility of
his acquiring a different disposition gradually began, but even
then the circumstances favoring the growth of a contentious
disposition supervened only gradually and partially. The habits
of life of the race were still perforce of a peaceful and
industrial character, rather than contentious and destructive.
Tools and implements, in the early days, must have served chiefly
to shape facts and objects for human use, rather than for
inflicting damage and discomfort. Industry would have to develop
far before it became possible for one group of men to live at the
cost of another; and during the protracted evolution of industry
before this point had been reached the discipline of associated
life still consistently ran in the direction of industrial
efficiency, both as regards men's physical and mental traits and
as regards their spiritual attitude.
By selection and by training, the life of man, before a
predaceous life became possible, would act to develop and to
conserve in him instinct for workmanship. The adaptation to the
environment which the situation enforced was of an industrial
kind; it required men to acquire facility in shaping things and
situations for human use. This does not mean the shaping of
things by the individual to his own individual use simply; for
archaic man was necessarily a member of a group, and during this
early stage, when industrial efficiency was still inconsiderable,
no group could have survived except on the basis of a sense of
solidarity strong enough to throw self-interest into the
background. Self-interest, as an accepted guide of action, is
possible only as the concomitant of a predatory life, and a
predatory life is possible only after the use of tools has
developed so far as to leave a large surplus of product over what
is required for the sustenance of the producers. Subsistence by
predation implies something substantial to prey upon.
Early man was a member of a group which depended for its
survival on the industrial efficiency of its members and on their
singleness of purpose in making use of the material means at
hand. Some competition between groups for the possession of the
fruits of the earth and for advantageous locations there would be
even at a relatively early stage, but much hostile contact
between groups there could not be; not enough to shape the
dominant habits of thought.
What men can do easily is what they do habitually, and this
decides what they can think and know easily. They feel at home in
the range of ideas which is familiar through their everyday line
of action. A habitual line of action constitutes a habitual line
of thought, and gives the point of view from which facts and
events are apprehended and reduced to a body of knowledge. What
is consistent with the habitual course of action is consistent
with the habitual line of thought, and gives the definitive
ground of knowledge as well as the conventional standard of
complacency or approval in any community. Conversely, a processor
method of life, once understood, assimilated in thought works
into the scheme of life and becomes a norm of conduct, simply
because the thinking, knowing agent is also the acting agent.
What is apprehended with facility and is consistent with the
process of life and knowledge is thereby apprehended as right and
good. All this applies with added force where the habituation is
not simply individual and sporadic, but is enforced upon the
group or the race by a selective elimination of those individuals
and lines of descent that do not conform to the required canon of
knowledge and conduct. Where this takes place, the acquired
proclivity passes from the status of habit to that of aptitude or
propensity. It becomes a transmissible trait, and action under
its guidance becomes right and good, and the longer and more
consistent the selective adaptation through which the aptitude
arises, the more firmly is the resulting aptitude settled upon
the race, and the more unquestioned becomes the sanction of the
resulting canon of conduct.
So far as regards his relation to the material means of life,
the canon of thought and of conduct which was in this way
enforced upon early man was what is here called the instinct of
workmanship. The interest which men took in economic facts on the
basis of this propensity, in the days before spoliation came into
vogue, was not primarily of a self-regarding character. The
necessary dominance of a sense of group solidarity would preclude
that. The selective process must eliminate lines of descent
unduly gifted with a self-regarding bias. Still, there was some
emulation between individuals, even in the most indigent and most
peaceable groups. From the readiness with which a scheme of
emulation is entered upon where late circumstances favor its
development, it seems probable that the proclivity to emulation
must have been present also in the earlier days in sufficient
force to assert itself to the extent to which the exigencies of
the earlier life of the group would permit. But this emulation
could not run in the direction of an individual, acquisition or
accumulation of goods, or of a life consistently given to raids
and tumults. It would be emulation such as is found among the
peaceable gregarious animals generally; that is to say, it was
primarily and chiefly sexual emulation, recurring with more or
less regularity. Beyond this there must also have been some
wrangling in the distribution of goods on hand, but neither this
nor the rivalry for subsistence could have been the dominant note
of life.
Under the canon of conduct imposed by the instinct of
workmanship, efficiency, serviceability, commends itself, and
inefficiency or futility is odious. Man contemplates his own
conduct and that of his neighbors, and passes a judgment of
complacency or of dispraise. The degree of effectiveness with
which he lives up to the accepted standard of efficiency in great
measure determines his contentment with himself and his
situation. A wide or persistent discrepancy in this respect is a
source of abounding spiritual discomfort.
Judgment may in this way be passed on the intention of the
agent or on the serviceability of the act. In the former case the
award of merit or demerit is to be classed as moral; and with
award of merit of this kind this paper is not concerned. As
regards serviceability or efficiency, men do not only take
thought at first hand of the facts of their own conduct; they are
also sensitive to rebuke or approval from others. Not only is the
immediate consciousness of the achievement of a purpose
gratifying and stimulating, but the imputation of efficiency by
one's fellows is perhaps no less gratifying or stimulating.
Sensitiveness to rebuke or approval is a matter of selective
necessity under the circumstances of associated life. Without it
no group of men could carry on a collective life in a material
environment that requires shaping to the ends of man. In this
respect, again, man shows a spiritual relationship with the
gregarious animals rather than with the solitarY beasts of prey.
Under the guidance of this taste for good work, men are
compared with one another and with the accepted ideals of
efficiency, and are rated and graded by the common sense of their
fellows according to a conventional scheme of merit and demerit.
The imputation of efficiency necessarily proceeds on evidence of
efficiency. The visible achievement of one man is, therefore,
compared with that of another, and the award of esteem comes
habitually to rest on an invidious comparison of persons instead
of on the immediate bearing of the given line of conduct upon the
approved end of action. The ground of esteem in this way shifts
from a direct appreciation of the expediency of conduct to a
comparison of the abilities of different agents. Instead of a
valuation of serviceability, there is a gauging of capability on
the ground of visible success. And what comes to be compared in
an invidious comparison of this kind between agents is the force
which the agent is able to put forth,.rather than the
serviceability of the agent's conduct. So soon, therefore, and in
so far, as the esteem awarded to serviceability passes into an
invidious esteem of one agent as compared with another, the end
sought in action will tend to change from naive expediency to the
manifestation of capacity or force. It becomes the proximate end
of effort to put forth evidence of power, rather than to achieve
an impersonal end for its own sake, simply as an item of human
use. So that, while in its more immediate expression the norm of
economic taste stands out as an impulse to workmanship or a taste
for serviceability and a distaste for futility, under given
circumstances of associated life it comes in some degree to take
on the character of an emulative demonstration of force.
Since the imputation of efficiency and of invidious merit
goes on the evidence afforded by visible success, the appearance
of evil must be avoided in order to escape dispraise. In the
early savage culture, while the group is small and while the
conditions favorable to a predatory life are still wanting, the
resulting emulation between the members of the group runs chiefly
to industrial efficiency. It comes to be the appearance of
industrial incapacity that is to be avoided. It is in this
direction that force or capacity can be put in evidence most
consistently and with the best effect for the good name of the
individual. It is, therefore, in this direction that a standard
of merit and a canon of meritorious conduct will develop. But
even for a growth of emulation in the productive use of brain and
muscle, the small, rude, peaceable group of savages is not
fertile ground. The situation does not favor a vigorous emulative
spirit. The conditions favorable to the growth of a habit of
emulative demonstration of force are (1) the frequent recurrence
of conjunctures that call for a great and sudden strain, and (2)
exposure of the individual to a large, and especially to a
shifting, human environment whose approval is sought. These
conditions are not effectually met on the lower levels of
savagery, such as human culture must have been during the early
days of the use of tools. Accordingly, relatively little of the
emulative spirit is seen in communities that have retained the
archaic, peaceable constitution, or that have reverted to it from
a higher culture. In such communities a low standard of culture
and comfort goes along with an absence of strenuous application
to the work in hand, as well as a relative absence of jealousy
and gradations of rank. Notions of economic rank and
discrimination between persons, whether in point of possessions
or in point of comfort, are almost, if not altogether, in
abeyance.
With a further development of the use of tools and of human
command over the forces of the environment, the habits of life of
the savage group change. There is likely to be more of
aggression, both in the way of a pursuit of large game and in the
way of conflict between groups. As the industrial efficiency of
the group increases, and as weapons are brought to greater
perfection, the incentives to aggression and the opportunities
for achievement along this line increase. The conditions
favorable to emulation are more fully met. With the increasing
density of population that follows from a heightened industrial
efficiency, the group passes, by force of circumstances, from the
archaic condition of poverty-stricken peace to a stage of
predatory life. This fighting stage - the beginning of barbarism
- may involve aggressive predation, or the group may simply be
placed on the defensive. One or the other, or both the lines of
activity - and commonly both, no doubt - will be forced upon the
group, on pain of extermination. This has apparently been the
usual course of early social evolution.
When a group emerges into this predatory phase of its
development, the employments which most occupy men's attention
are employments that involve exploit. The most serious concern of
the group, and at the same time the direction in which the most
spectacular effect may be achieved by the individual, is conflict
with men and beasts. It becomes easy to make a telling comparison
between men when their work is a series of exploits carried out
against these difficult adversaries or against the formidable
movements of the elements. The assertion of the strong hand,
successful aggression, usually of a destructive character,
becomes the accepted basis of repute. The dominant life interest
of the group throws its strong light upon this creditable
employment of force and sagacity, and the other, obscurer ways of
serving the group's life fall into the background. The guiding
animus of the group becomes a militant one, and men's actions are
judged from the standpoint of the fighting man. What is
recognized, without reflection and without misgiving, as
serviceable and effective in such a group is fighting capacity.
Exploit becomes the conventional ground of invidious comparison
between individuals, and repute comes to rest on prowess.
As the predatory culture reaches a fuller development, there
comes a distinction between employments. The tradition of
prowess, as the virtue par excellence, gains in scope and
consistency until prowess comes near being recognized as the sole
virtue. Those employments alone are then worthy and reputable
which involve the exercise of this virtue. Other employments, in
which men are occupied with tamely shaping inert materials to
human use, become unworthy and end with becoming debasing. The
honorable man must not only show capacity for predatory exploit,
but he must also avoid entanglement with the occupations that do
not involve exploit. The tame employments, those that involve no
obvious destruction of life and no spectacular coercion of
refractory antagonists, fall into disrepute and are relegated to
those members of the community who are defective in predatory
capacity; that is to say, those who are lacking in massiveness,
agility, or ferocity. Occupation in these employments argues that
the person so occupied falls short of that decent modicum of
prowess which would entitle him to be graded as a man in good
standing. In order to an unsullied reputation, the appearance of
evil must be avoided. Therefore the able-bodied barbarian of the
predatory culture, who is at all mindful of his good name,
severely leaves all uneventful drudgery to the women and minors
of the group. He puts in his time in the manly arts of war and
devotes his talents to devising ways and means of disturbing the
peace. That way lies honor.
In the barbarian scheme of life the peaceable, industrial
employments are women's work. They imply defective force,
incapacity for aggression or devastation, and are therefore not
of good report. But whatever is accepted as a conventional mark
of a shortcoming or a vice comes presently to be accounted
intrinsically base. In this way industrial occupations fall under
a polite odium and are apprehended to be substantially ignoble.
They are unsportsmanlike. Labor carries a taint, and all
contamination from vulgar employments must be shunned by
self-respecting men.
Where the predatory culture has developed in full
consistency, the common-sense apprehension that labor is ignoble
has developed into the further refinement that labor is wrong -
for those who are not already beneath reproach. Hence certain
well-known features of caste and tabu. In the further cultural
development, when some wealth has been accumulated and the
members of the community fall into a servile class on the one
hand and a leisure class on the other, the tradition that labor
is ignoble gains an added significance. It is not only a mark of
inferior force, but it is also a perquisite of the poor. This is
the situation today. Labor is morally impossible by force of the
ancient tradition that has come down from early barbarism, and it
is shameful by force of its evil association with poverty. It is
indecorous.
The irksomeness of labor is a spiritual fact; it lies in the
indignity of the thing. The fact of its irksomeness is, of
course, none the less real and cogent for its being of a
spiritual kind. Indeed, it is all the more substantial and
irremediable on that account. Physical irksomeness and
distastefulness can be borne, if only the spiritual incentive is
present. Witness the attractiveness of warfare, both to the
barbarian and to the civilized youth. The most common-place
recital of a campaigner's experience carries a sweeping
suggestion of privation, exposure, fatigue, vermin, squalor,
sickness, and loathsome death; the incidents and accessories of
war are said to be unsavory, unsightly, unwholesome beyond the
power of words; yet warfare is an attractive employment if one
only is gifted with a suitable habit of mind. Most sports, and
many other polite employments that are distressing but
creditable, are evidence to the same effect.
Physical irksomeness is an incommodity which men habitually
make light of if it is not reinforced by the sanction of decorum;
but it is otherwise with the spiritual irksomeness of such labor
as is condemned by polite usage. That is a cultural fact. There
is no remedy for this kind of irksomeness, short of a subversion
of that cultural structure on which our canons of decency rest.
Appeal may of course be made to taste and conscience to set aside
the conventional aversion to labor; such an appeal is made from
time to time by well-meaning and sanguine persons, and some
fitful results have been achieved in that way. But the
commonplace, common-sense man is bound by the deliverances of
common-sense decorum on this head - the heritage of an unbroken
cultural line of descent that runs back to the beginning.